At Farnborough airshow last month, one of the more striking displays was a drone hanging beneath a simple promise: GPS-free quantum navigation.
The demo came from Q-CTRL, but the company is not really the story here. The interesting thing was the problem statement. In a world where positioning, navigation and timing are assumed to be permanently available, what happens when the signal disappears -or worse, when it lies?
That question is moving quickly beyond defence and aerospace. It matters to ports, rail, emergency services, telecoms, energy systems, logistics networks and financial infrastructure. GPS has become so embedded in modern operations that much of its importance is invisible. We notice it when our phone map fails. But in critical systems, a loss of trusted PNT can mean delayed response, unsafe routing, unstable timing or an inability to know which data is still reliable.
PNT is becoming a resilience issue in its own right.
The cost of invisible infrastructure
The UK Government’s latest published nationwide assessment, based on 2020/21 data and released in 2023, estimated that a 24-hour GNSS outage could cost £1.42 billion, rising to £7.64 billion over seven days.
Download the London Economics report here.
Those are not abstract figures. They describe an economy that has gradually built operational dependency on a relatively weak signal arriving from space.
The impact is also concentrated. Emergency services, maritime and road transport together account for 87.6% of the estimated economic losses from a seven-day GNSS disruption. That matters because these are not sectors that can simply pause, wait for a satellite signal to recover and restart on Monday morning.
but the point is not that GPS is unreliable in normal circumstances. It is remarkably capable and remains foundational.
The point is that a critical system built around only one source of position or time creates a predictable single point of failure.
That becomes more serious when the disruption is deliberate.
Jamming is one problem. Spoofing is another.
GNSS jamming blocks or overwhelms a receiver so it cannot use the signal. Spoofing is often more uncomfortable.
it feeds the receiver false information that can look legitimate, causing it to calculate the wrong position or time.
For an aviation operator, that might create navigational uncertainty. For a ship, it may affect route awareness. For a connected infrastructure system, incorrect timing can propagate into systems that rely on synchronized data, communications or control.
European aviation authorities are now treating this as an operational safety problem rather than a distant edge case. In June 2025, EASA and IATA called for a coordinated plan involving better incident reporting, real-time monitoring, mitigation, backup navigation infrastructure and stronger civil-military co-ordination.
The significance is not simply that interference is happening. It is that regulators are moving from a containment mindset to a resilience mindset.
That distinction matters.
Containment asks -
how can we stop or respond to interference?
Resilience asks -
what does the system do safely while interference is happening?
Those are very different engineering questions.
The sectors that cannot wait!
The political and commercial narrative around PNT often starts with military platforms. That is understandable because contested navigation environments create an obvious need for independence from satellite signals. But the broader PNT market will be shaped by less dramatic systems that cannot afford to lose trust in their inputs for example -
Aviation and drones: aircraft, drones and airport operations need reliable navigation, safe fallback procedures and awareness of signal integrity.
Maritime and ports: vessel positioning, port logistics and safety systems depend on reliable location and timing.
Road and autonomous systems: fleet routing, connected vehicles and emergency response all rely on trusted position.
Telecoms and data infrastructure: precise timing is essential for network synchronization and increasingly important for distributed digital systems.
Energy: electricity networks need timing and synchronization to coordinate generation, transmission and monitoring.
Financial infrastructure: transaction sequencing, compliance and market systems depend on accurate, traceable time.
This is why the UK’s PNT resilience framework is important. It is not proposing a single replacement for satellite navigation. It includes plans for a National Timing Centre, resilient terrestrial timing, a potential eLoran backup for position and navigation, more resilient receiver chips, holdover clocks and a UK satellite-based augmentation capability.
That is a much more realistic direction of travel that is layered resilience rather than technological substitution.
Suggested placement: insert the sector-concentration chart here.
A quantum sensor is not the architecture
Quantum sensing has a legitimate role in this emerging stack. Atomic clocks can provide highly stable timing. Quantum inertial sensors could reduce drift in navigation systems. Magnetic and gravity sensing could support map-based navigation where satellite signals are unavailable or untrustworthy.
But “quantum navigation” should not be treated as shorthand for a complete PNT solution.
No critical-infrastructure operator should be buying a promise that one sensor will solve a system problem. The real question is whether a platform can continue to operate safely when one source of information fails, degrades or becomes deceptive.
That requires an architecture that can combine independent sources of evidence:
Multi-constellation and authenticated GNSS when satellite signals are available.
Inertial navigation for continuity through short outages.
Terrestrial options such as eLoran.
Local timing and holdover clocks.
Signals of opportunity, including cellular and other ambient radio sources where appropriate.
Magnetic or gravity maps in specific environments.
Quantum sensors where they offer an independently valuable measurement.
Edge AI to detect anomalies, fuse sensor inputs and report confidence rather than false certainty.
The final item is particularly important.
Systems do not fail only because a sensor becomes unavailable. They fail because the wider decision chain does not recognise that the sensor can no longer be trusted.
An intelligent PNT system needs to answer more than “Where am I?” It needs to answer: “How confident am I in that answer?” And when confidence drops, it must move gracefully into a safer operating mode.
That is where sensor fusion, anomaly detection and edge decision-making become as important as the underlying quantum hardware.
From demo to deployment
The drone at Farnborough made a good visual demonstration of the challenge. But the real commercial story will be less theatrical.
It will be about the operator who needs their asset to retain navigational confidence during a GNSS disruption. The airport that needs safer drone operations. The port that needs continuity in a dense and contested RF environment. The rail, energy or telecoms network that needs trusted timing even when its preferred reference is compromised.
For quantum sensing companies, the opportunity is substantial, but it comes with a discipline. The product cannot simply be a better sensor. It must integrate into the operational stack:
existing navigation systems, maps, edge compute, human workflows, safety processes and procurement constraints.
The question is not whether quantum can replace GPS.
The better question is: when GPS cannot be trusted, what combination of sensing, timing and intelligent decision-making keeps the system operating safely?
That is the PNT market now taking shape.
And that is where quantum sensing has a chance to become useful infrastructure rather than merely an impressive demo.
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